Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For this week’s issue I filed an ambivalent review about Bread & Wine, a new wine bar in the underserved Old Irving Park neighborhood. Last week I griped about Tavernita. I’m pretty unimpressed with the next new restaurant I’ll be reviewing too. Oh, boo hoo, right? But at times like these I’m grateful to be reminded I’m not working in Grand Forks, North Dakota:...

In January, after years of legal and political battles, the city agreed to pay $19.8 million to settle lawsuits by four men who were tortured by police under former commander Jon Burge. Signing off on the deal, aldermen condemned the abusive officers and hoped aloud that the settlements would let the police department start a new era. “I’m glad this is over,” said the Fifth Ward’s Leslie Hairston. “It’s definitely a black eye on Chicago and on our history....

Sun Ra Strange Strings (Unheard Music Series/Atavistic) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the three elements in Variations, the door was perhaps most unusual. Unlike the saw, it can’t be controlled enough to create a melody. It can, however, be used to produce a wide range of sounds, some of which resemble the sounds that traditional instruments make. Henry decontextualized the door, manipulating its creaks to such a degree that their source was rendered irrelevant, but two recent releases–a reissue of an obscure Sun Ra record and a new collaboration between Paris-based Spanish drummer Ramon Lopez and Finnish bassist Teppo Hauta-Aho–prominently feature it, free of processing, as an instrument of improvisation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the top of the ticket is $719,500 to ProPublica and the New York Times for DocumentCloud. That’s a Web site “that will enhance investigative reporting by making source documents easy to find, share and read,” the foundation explains. “While rich source documents are the foundation of investigative journalism, too often reporters throw or tuck them away after a story fades, never to be used again....

Last summer Jamil Khoury erased all doubt: he’s far and away the hardest-working polemicist in Chicago theater. June saw the Silk Road Rising artistic director going after Mary Zimmerman for the “shocking and breathtaking” insensitivity of comments she made apropos of her Goodman Theatre staging of The Jungle Book. In an essay posted on his company website, Khoury damned the “theatricalized Orientalism” of Zimmerman’s oeuvre, the “unexamined white privilege” in her attitudes, and—somewhat mysteriously—the way her thinking echoed “how our judicial system has historically protected rapists....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ex-Chicagoan Merry White is a Boston University anthropologist and author whose most recent book is Coffee Life in Japan, a memoir cum ethnographic study. But back in her school days at Harvard (she now holds a faculty research appointment there), she took a job cooking at the campus’s Center for West European Studies, where she was responsible for weekly luncheons....

Jonathan “Yony” Leyser’s brief career has been all about celebrating outsiders, in sordid but sympathetic portraits of transgender and anarchist communes, addicts and migrant workers. Now the 24-year-old filmmaker and photographer, who’s been kicked out of two art schools, is nearly finished with an ambitious assessment of perhaps the greatest literary outlaw of the 20th century. The son of Israeli immigrants who’d come to Chicago in the 70s, Leyser was just 12 when Burroughs died in 1997, at age 83....

One day a few weeks ago, I took a drive out to Wilmette to visit the Marie Murphy School, a public middle school not far off the Edens Expressway. My host was Bruce Cook, a sixth-grade teacher I’d met at a party. He had graciously offered to give me a tour of his school so I could see how the other half lived. I tried not to gape, but for a guy used to the barren impoverishment of Chicago’s schools–even its highly regarded magnet schools–it looked like Shangri-la....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It would be something of an overstatement to call Robert Aldrich an overlooked filmmaker. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and The Dirty Dozen (1967) remain well-known, and at least two of his other films—Emperor of the North (1973) and The Longest Yard (1974)—were regular fixtures on network TV for decades. But if you know Aldrich from only those titles, you’re missing out on one of the most interesting and challenging filmographies in U....

Zina Murray was, as she put it later, “verklempt.” Since Logan Square Kitchen opened just over a year ago, the kitchen has attracted a handful of regular clients, mostly pastry chefs and confectioners. The events space has been home to weddings and a pastry market, and this past spring, before she opened Girl and the Goat, Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard teamed up with Boka’s Giuseppe Tentori and Rick Gresh from David Burke’s Primehouse to host two private dinners there....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve often wondered why I wasn’t born in Paris so that I could have the charmed life of Carine Roitfeld, the rock-chic editor of French Vogue who’s known for her powerful personal style and her visionary stewardship of the magazine. In fact, her style–razor-sharp straight hair, smoky eyes, unruly brows, a black-and-gray palette, and always, always the highest of heels–has often driven the magazine’s aesthetic....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Basia Bulat returns to Schubas, playing music from the terrific new Heart of My Own (Rough Trade). “A couple years ago, when I first heard her fine debut album, Oh, My Darling, I was immediately hooked by her strong, distinctive voice, which shaped the pretty, delicate melodies with unassuming confidence,” writes Peter Margasak. “The new album, produced by Montreal scene fixture Howard Bilerman, is even better....

Ah, the middle o’ March in Chicago. Time to warm our winter-weary hearts watching the first green of the season flow under the Michigan Avenue bridge, and hark to the distinctive whine of the bagpipes—like the drone of a giant hive of alien insects—on Columbus Drive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Bands like the Rovers help to perpetuate the American understanding of bagpipes as a droning, cacophonous din,” says Currie, when the sound of a properly tuned and played pipe is “sweet” and “consonant....

Reckless Records House Band: Longtime no-wave scene fixture Jim Magas (Magas, Lake of Dracula) has formed a new group, the Violent ARP Band, which he describes on his blog as “high-velocity avant heavy sludge.” The band members are all fellow employees of the local Reckless chain: Matt Jencik (Don Caballero, Papa M) on bass, Eli Caterer (Smoking Popes) on guitar, and Dave “King of Metal” Hoffa (Chicago Thrash Ensemble, Authority Abuse) on drums....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are lots of admired people on Chicago’s food scene, and lots of well-liked people, but the list of people who are genuinely loved is probably fairly short, and Ina would be on practically everybody’s. Partly because everyone who’s moved into the hot Randolph Street restaurant row in the last decade wound up having breakfast meetings at Ina’s and got to know her; how lucky for them that the hot strip came with a Jewish grandmother built in....

Rich Hein/Sun-Times Former 50th Ward alderman Bernard Stone, who died Monday at age 87. Suddenly everyone was talking about cleaning up government. The feds had imprisoned leaders of Mayor Richard Daley’s patronage operation and indicted Governor Rod Blagojevich for his pay-to-play politics. Even the mayor was promising reform. “Boo!” he shouted, literally giving the other aldermen a thumbs-down. “You’re a bunch of stupid dummies!” He knew who had elected him....

Anton Chekhov never dug a deeper dramatic hole than Three Sisters, his tragicomic portrait of the singularly ineffectual Prozorov sisters, desperate to flee their deceased father’s provincial estate and return to the Moscow of their childhoods. He all but buries the play alive, filling it with self-absorbed idlers lacking any discernible urge to do anything except lament their inability to do anything. The master of plotlessness (to borrow George Bernard Shaw’s phrase) presents four long acts during which almost nothing happens....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Things are looking up a little for flamboyant Internet entrepreneur, accused uberpirate, and recording artist Kim Dotcom, who in January had his rented New Zealand mansion raided by New Zealand police at the behest of the U.S. Justice Department, which was acting at the behest of major media companies who felt that illegal file trading via Dotcom’s massively popular Megaupload file-locker service was costing them money....

Now that a judge has affirmed the ruling by the Board of Election Commissioners that Rahm Emanuel is neither an illegal alien nor an undocumented resident, the mayoral campaign can move ahead in earnest. Moseley Braun certainly benefits from the withdrawal of her main African-American rivals, but she remains far behind Emanuel. She now is the likeliest to make it into a runoff with Emanuel. A runoff only happens, though, if no candidate gets a majority on February 22....

Voting Guides Missed Connections Genre-related references related to a larger cultural discussion? It’s not too late. Fold these into the batter, bake, and serve: Panic in the Year Zero, Soylent Green, Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome, Pale Rider, The Bed-Sitting Room, Welcome to Blood City, No Blade of Grass. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David G. Whiteis Finally, I don’t recall any obituarists tidying up Burroughs’s curriculum vitae when he died....